1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to an article for screening candidate insect repellents, and uses thereof.
2. Description of Related Art
Insect pests, particularly those live by hematophagy on the blood of other animals, such as mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians, are nuisance to their hosts, and sometimes are responsible for transmitting diseases. For example, fleas are responsible for transmitting the majority of vector-borne zoonosis diseases, such as plague, murine typhus, tapeworm, and cat scratch disease. Bites made by such pests often causes itching sensation, which in turn may result in the host attempting to ease the itching sensation by biting, pecking, scratching, etc. in the vicinity of the bites; in more severe cases, host will develop rashes due to allergy reaction to the saliva of such insect pest. Hence, the prevention of pest bites and the prompt detection and removal of attached pests may greatly reduce the chance of developing allergy reactions and/or vector-borne diseases. Wearing a repellent can substantially increase the level of protection or reduce the chance of being attacked by such pests. A variety of repellent assays have thus been developed for evaluating candidate substances or formulations. In general, these tests can be classified into two categories: use of live hosts with or without some sort of attractants associated with hosts, or no use of live hosts at all. The latter is better to standardize and is cheap, but suffers from a poor ability to filter out weak repellents. The former is usually more predicative in forecasting the efficacy of the substance under certain conditions, though sometimes difficult to standardize, particularly in the field, and is usually more expensive and time-consuming.
In view of the forgoing problems, there exists in this art a need to develop an improved insect pest repellent assay that is not only simple, fast, and cheap; but also can be reproduced in mass numbers to speed up the screening process when thousands of candidate compounds are involved, and with an improved ability to filter out weak repellents.